Experimental activity on two tubular solid oxide fuel cell cogeneration plants in a real industrial environment

The EOS project carries on an industrial research on stationary fuel cells based on the SOFC technology developed by Siemens, through a co-operation between TurboCare S.p.A. and Politecnico di Torino. Two SOFC units have been installed and operated in the TurboCare workshop. The running hours of the CHP100 generator are more than 16,400 h; the 5-kW Alpha6 generator is in operation since more than 10′000 h.The aim of this paper is the comparison of two similar experimental campaigns performed on the two prototypes with different nominal power, in order to investigate the performance of the two generator designs. The factorial analysis has been applied considering two factors: setup temperature of the generator and fuel utilization factor. First, the obtained data have been analyzed by using the ANOVA of the experimental data of some dependent variables. Then, the regression models have been obtained for every dependent variable considered, and an optimization analysis has been performed. The analysis shows that the stack voltage sensitivity to the fuel utilization of the two systems has nearly the same value; and the stack voltage sensitivity to the generator setup temperature is different for the two systems.